Which TV should you buy in 2018?

Let's start with the bad news out of this year's Consumer Electronics Show, the mother of all TV expos.

This is the fact that, if you want to start researching which TV you're going to buy this year – a big decision bound to involve all members of your household – you might have to hold off for a few months.

The world's biggest TV maker (and I mean that in both senses, as you shall see) sat out the Las Vegas show this year. Samsung, which normally reveals a whole swag of new television sets and at least one new bit of TV jargon (last year it was "QLED") has decided it won't announce its new models until closer to their release date, presumably because this will make them harder to copy. (Who else thinks the frame TV launched by TCL at CES this year looks a lot like Samsung's Frame TV?)

LG's portable projector is just one new way to watch TV in 2018

Samsung did launch one television, though, which is the other bad piece of news for those of us in a hurry or on a budget

Samsung's The Wall

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The very first thing you need to know about Samsung's The Wall TV is that it is going to cost around $100,000 for the 146-inch model when eventually it comes to Australia. That's the only size that Samsung is promising for 2018.

The second thing you need to know is that it's Samsung answer to OLED. The Wall uses a new technology known as Micro LED, which Samsung says will have all the benefits of OLED, such as perfectly black blacks and luscious, saturated colours, with none of the drawbacks, such as the way the organic compounds in OLED can fade or burn in more quickly than the inorganic compounds in ordinary LEDs.

Not only is The Wall the world's first consumer TV to attempt to use tiny LEDs to create its pictures, it's also the first modular TV to hit the market. The screen is made up of tiles that can be clipped together, to allow customers to create shapes and sizes that best match their living rooms.

Exactly how the modular system will work, and what impact it will have on image scaling, Samsung isn't saying yet. Nor do we know how small these Micro LEDs will be, a fact that will determine the smallest screen size they can be used in. They'll need to be pretty small if Samsung wants to fit 24.9 million of them into, say, a 56-inch UHD TV. More will be revealed in a few months, presumably when the rest of Samsung's 2018 lineup of QLED TVs is announced.

LG OLED

LG's answer to OLED is … well, LG doesn't need an answer to OLED. It's the only company that's figured out how to put the dazzling display technology into TVs. (Though, if you want to be pedantic, LG uses a technology called WOLED. It's a form of OLED, and it looks amazing.)

Samsung's The Wall is going to cost around $100,000. But you're almost guaranteed none of your friends will have one.

This year's LG OLED TVs will be much like last year's model, except with noticeably improved image processing and the addition of ThinQ, LG's artificial intelligence platform, which will allow you to control other LG appliances from your TV. ThinQ also comes with Google's Assistant, which lets your TV understand the natural-language you bark at it.. Amazon's Alexa will also be added if and when Amazon releases Alexa in Australia.

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LG also showed off a rollable OLED TV, which has a screen sort of like a portable projector screen that can be rolled down part way to turn it into a long, thin TV, or rolled down completely to hide it altogether. But it's not something you can expect to see in the shops this year, so the less you know about it, the better. To see it is to want it, and to want it is to put off your buying decision for another year at least.

Sony LCD, OLED

Sony seems to be taking a fairly cautious approach to 2018, announcing fairly modest enhancements to its TVs to improve their colour, contrast and clarity, and to make them a little more accessible to customers.

Sony's best TV from 2017, the incredible A1E OLED TV, now has a sister model called the A8F. This will use LG's OLED panel to achieve perfect blacks and incredibly deep colours, and it will incorporate other A1E innovations such as the Acoustic Surface, which turns the screen itself into a giant speaker. But unlike the easel-inspired A1E, the A8F will come as a more conventional TV, without the giant hinged stand propping it up. It ought to be a little cheaper than the A1E, too, since the conventional design should be easier to manufacture.

LG is putting its ThinQ artificial intelligence into all its TVs.

Meanwhile Sony's less-exciting LCD TVs will be much like last year's, only in bigger screen sizes (which is a key trend, with 75-inch TVs becoming the new norm) and with a new motion-blur system known as X-Motion Clarity, which is designed to cope with the bigger screen sizes.

Panasonic OLED

Maybe you've noticed our bias towards OLED? That's because OLED happens to be the best TV technology out there, and will remain so at least until Samsung releases its Micro LED screens in sizes that mortals can use and afford.

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Like Sony, Panasonic is using LG's OLED panels in its premium TVs, but it announced at CES that it was adopting a little of Samsung's technology too – in the shape of the HDR10+ dynamic range technology that Samsung created in answer to Dolby Vision.

HDR10+, which unlike Dolby Vision is a free, open standard, allows filmmakers to finely calibrate their movies so they can show excellent details in the black tones and bright yet detailed highlights. If it takes off (and given Samsung's commitment to it, that's very likely, because Samsung sells more TVs than any other manufacturer), it will make a big difference to OLED images, which can crush their black tones so much we've literally had to switch to an LCD TV just to see what was going on in the shadows.